NYC law firm employee convicted of stealing $376,000 worth of copy machine toner - <AUTHOR> http://manhattanda.org/press-release/da-vance-announces-conviction-adrian-rodriguez-stealing-large-quantities-copy-machine-

<comment><USER2> There was a corruption scandal in Australia where government employees were recieving sizable kickbacks for ordering 40 years worth of toner at 3 times the retail price [http://www.itnews.com.au/News/260705,vic-govt-stung-by- print...](http://www.itnews.com.au/News/260705,vic-govt-stung-by-print-toner- scandal.aspx)

<comment><USER3> That sounds like every government purchase of IT systems ever.

(I seem to read news about some US govt department buying IT systems for 3~10x the price every month)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably about 2 days of overcharging of clients by the firm as a whole, but he's blue collar, so off to jail with him. Which about sums it all up, really.

<comment><USER5> Embezzlement, which is what this was [1], is a white-collar crime. Just like overcharging clients. In fact, there's nothing to even suggest that he was a "blue-collar worker", particularly if he was entrusted with making hundreds of thousands of dollars of purchases.

Not everything needs to be a socio-economic conspiracy theory. Justice prevailed here. If you have evidence that this law firm is fraudulently overcharging its clients, I suggest you present that evidence to the authorities. In the meantime, don't try to insinuate that this guy was somehow a victim.

[1] I know technically the conviction was for larceny. Looking at the 3rd paragraph of the following, it can be seen as a pretty blurry line: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embezzlement#Embezzlement_versu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embezzlement#Embezzlement_versus_larceny). Based on the example there, it seems like the charge could just have easily fit the definition of embezzlement.

<comment><USER6> How is overcharging clients a crime? You mean billing for time that wasn't actually spent on the client, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's like 4 Xerox drum cartridges?

</comment><comment><USER8> Copy toner is the new cocaine!

<comment><USER3> Ironically, Tide detergent actually _is_ the new drug currency: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204>

<comment><USER9> Here in Santa Cruz, bike seat posts and rims are recycled by junkies to get their next hit.

Frames and other less desirable/recyclable parts are just left as trash.

<comment><USER3> What makes frames less desirable than seat posts, may I ask? (I guess if seat posts are steel and the frame is aluminum?)

<comment><USER9> Seatposts and rims seem to be easier to transport and hide in transit.

Common wisdom is a seatpost gets you about $10 which helps towards one's daily fix.

Actually bike theft around here falls into two categories -- high end that are shipped out of area quickly and low end which are chopped up and "recycled" for a quick buck.

Lots of the chop shops have been found of late due to a community effort to try and clean things up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All I can think is if this guy wasn't convicted: "Please tell us about the time you, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

<comment><USER11> He didn't truly hack the system as much as he committed a very dumb theft/crime.

Between an approximately two year period (Oct 2010 to Dec 2012), he ordered an amount of toners that greatly exceeded the law firm's usage. This jump in cost would have been pretty obvious to an auditor/accountant comparing it to the historical order amount for ink toners & some sanity check.

But because he got away with it for two+ years, makes me wonder whether he greatly increased these orders after the first year of getting away with it.

<comment><USER12> One could retort that technically any crime is a form of (non-computer) black hat hacking.

<comment><USER13> Especially if you use an axe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Orbit of the Moon around the Sun is Convex - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/teaching/convex.html?HN_2

<comment><USER2> Wow.

I understood the argument that the speed of the Earth's orbit dominated the Moon's, but I was having a really tough time visualizing it. The wiki article ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Path_of_Earth...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Path_of_Earth_and_Moon_around_Sun)) has a diagram that explains it (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_trajectory1.svg>)

<comment><USER3> Another argument is this:

The (wrong) graph has been drawn with 12 cycles, based on approximately 12 lunar months per year. But the result is obviously not to scale. If you try to draw it to scale, the truth jumps out at you; it can't have this form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, this fact makes it awfully hard to draw realistically. Just try to draw a circle (Earth's orbit around the sun) and then a convex curve that crosses it from time to time. Pretty hard not to make it concave.

<comment><USER5> Given the Earth-Moon distance of about 380000 km and Earth-Sun distance of about 150000000 km, the lunar orbit deviates from Earth's orbit about 0.25% at most; if the Earth-Moon distance [1] were one meter, the maximum deviation would be ~2.5 millimeters. So, yeah, "awfully hard" just about describes the situation.

[1] The average distance - Earth's orbit is not a circle, after all.

<comment><USER6> Does the fact that the earths orbit is not a circle lead to an instability? So the deviation will change over time - whether by converging on a circle or spinning away. [totally naive question]

<comment><USER7> The Moon is slowly moving away due to tidal interaction. If the Earth and Moon were tidally locked (both presenting the same face to each other at all times) then the orbit would remain stable. If the Earth would be spinning slower than the Moon, then the Moon would be slowly pushed inward.

An interesting consequence is that in a billion year's time, after Earth's oceans would have evaporated, this tidal interaction would greatly reduce, "fixing" the Earth-Moon system in place.

More here: <http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html>

<comment><USER6> Thanks, very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The spirals don't seem intuitive to me. Do most people really think the moon has a negative velocity during parts of its orbit about the sun?

<comment><USER9> Why wouldn't it? When it's going around the earth, it's going to be going in the opposite direction from the earth's orbit part of the time. The question is which motion is bigger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought it would look like a sine wave on a circle...Well but that totally unexpected. Do check the guys other writings they are really __very interesting __.

</comment><comment><USER11> Spirograph is a lie!

</comment><comment><USER12> this isn't a shaggy dog joke about the moon having an orbit closely conforming to a polygon with 13.37 (1337) sides?</comment>


Show HN: My One-Man One-Year Part-Time Project - <AUTHOR>

I made this site over the past year in my own time, http://bizspeaking.com/ , the Twitter for deals.
I'm going full-time on this project and sincerely seek all suggestions on building a viable business -- partner, funding, mentor, referrer, designer, developer, legal, anything.
Technically, this site is mainly made with the Pyramid (Python) web framework, PostgreSQL as relational db, MongoDB as document store, Redis as cache/queue, and Solr for search.
Do follow our AngelList page http://angel.co/bizspeaking , and official blog http://bizspeaking.posterous.com/
Thank you! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links -- <http://bizspeaking.com> , <http://angel.co/bizspeaking></comment>


FCC to examine problems with 911 calling in enterprise systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-346896A1.pdf <comment><USER2> Ah, this is the opposite direction of what I thought: often "dial 9 to reach an outside line" systems end up triggering accidental calls to 911, especially since the person making the mistake just hangs up, in which case 911 is required to send a responder out.

That's not what this is about at all, but rather that "systems may not support direct 911 dialing, route 911 calls to the nearest 911 call center, or transmit accurate information on the caller's location or call-back number." That is indeed a much more important issue!

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised corporate phones don't just have an "outside call" button built in, that transparently dials the magical incantation for you. No more mistakes - just lift, press the "I am going to make a phone call now" button, and then make the phone call.

<comment><USER4> Corps don't want to encourage (paid for) outside calls in many case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is good.

Side note: If you have _any_ responsibility for your office's phone system, do a 911 Test once a quarter.

[http://karl.kornel.us/2014/10/the-911-test/](http://karl.kornel.us/2014/10/the-911-test/) (Shameless Plug!)

At my previous company (which got bought by another company, and so no longer exists), we had a Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM) 6.5 system. When I started, we had three voice T1s at HQ: Two were AT&T ISDN voice T1s, and had our 4000-DID block assigned to it. The second voice T1 was a Verizon CAS voice T1, and was used for outbound calls only.

We could make 911 calls out through either provider, and that was how it was set up: Prefer AT&T outbound; fall back to Verizon if the AT&T lines were full or down. In both cases, the local 911 dispatch would receive out street address when the call came through (I tested this).

Later on, as part of a move to AT&T Gigabit fiber, we replaced the two T1s with SIP. Among all of the other issues we had, the 911 center suddenly stopped getting our address information: The appropriate fields on their end were just blank.

Talking to AT&T, the impression I got was that it was our problem to deal with.

In the end, and with the merger looming, I switched our 911 config to the Verizon backup (which I insisted we keep), so that 911 dispatch would get our address.

So, again: Find out who at your $WORK is responsible for phones, and make sure they do a 911 test every quarter!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is super important. In an emergency you don't necessarily have time to learn how to dial out.

For VOIP solutions that often come with the "don't call 911 it won't work" caveat. That isn't good enough. In fact, maybe the FCC should take the position that mishandling these calls by VoIP systems is equivalent to blocking/impeding them. E.g. its bad practice (and I think illegal) for a cell phone to be inoperable for emergency calls while locked.

<comment><USER7> Hum. 99% of users in a large company have a mobile phone. Feels a bit like a corner case problem.

<comment><USER8> That creates a different problem, which is also dangerous.

In a large company, you want physical security to know when there's an emergency. They can usually get to the scene much, much quicker, and will need to let emergency services into the building anyway.

With landline corporate phones, they can be configured so that if the user direct dials 911, they can flag the extension and flash an alarm in the security office. Hotels often have a similar setup. (Avaya calls it "On-Site Notification", Cisco calls it "Cisco Emergency Responder".)

If employees/guests are direct dialing 911 from a cell phone, building security has no idea what's going on.

<comment><USER9> This is exactly the case.

Further, the parent comment is ignoring certain companies and agencies that explicitly prohibit cell phones on site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Their are companies out there that answer 911 calls originating form VOIP systems. I work for one that handles provides those services to nearly a 1 million VOIP users. We handle a LOT of V911 calls everyday.

Also, with the growing popularity of providing Wifi telephony, their are bigger 911 issues in the offing.

<comment><USER11> "systems may not support direct 911 dialing, _route 911 calls to the nearest 911 call center, or transmit accurate information on the caller's location or call-back number_." Points #2 and 3 are what's critical here.

<comment><USER10> I'm aware, I don't want to use the comments as advertising, but these problems have been addressed in a specialized manner with the services we provide. Not that they can't be wrong (location) but protocols are in place for dealing with those that are/maybe.

Does it need to be fixed? Yes! but its wrong to assume that V911 is broken at a wholesale level. The same issues face E911 as well. The entire location system (Long/Lat) does not work well when altitude is brought into play. Their are standards in place for VOIP systems to transmit their exact NETWORK location, but it rarely implemented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Bout damn time</comment>


If Apple wants my $$$, I will just give it away. - <AUTHOR>

A year ago I built PresenterMate as a fun project, to try out Mac development and because a cluttered desktop was driving me mad! Since then, the app only sold a few hundred copies. Instead of paying another 100 bucks to keep my app on the app store, I am putting it out there for free. Feel free to download here - http://www.presentermate.com/ <comment><USER2> Your title makes this sound controversial, but it seems pretty straight forward.

If as you said, you sold a few hundred copies at both $2.99 and $4.99, haven't you made enough to renew the $99 dev fee and still be ahead? Assuming 'a few hundred' means 300 (could be more) and charging the minimum you stated of $2.99, that's a little over $600 profit after Apple's cut. Pay the dev fee and you are still up $500. Doesn't sound like much, but match the success of this app (which I think you feel is actually a failure) with 3 more apps and you have $2,000 a year--enough to get a new, tricked out Mac every year.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "how it works" video on your website is blocked as private :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How much were you selling it for on the Mac App Store?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried both, $2.99 and $4.99 and both prices seemed to work, although the former had more sales. That said, I still had people complaining that paying 2.99 for this app was waaaaay too much. Maybe I should've done what Starbucks does - call it a special seasonal drink and charge $5 a pop?</comment></comment>


John Scalzi: The Humble eBook Bundles and Authors - <AUTHOR> http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/10/24/the-humble-ebook-bundles-and-authors/ <comment><USER2> I was involved in some talks around the Humble ebook bundel last year, there were a LOT more authors who wanted to be a part of this but they couldn't get their publishing houses who they had handed their ebook rights over to go along.</comment>


Transforming computer into a cloud server - <AUTHOR> https://www.basefolder.com/index.php/features/ <comment><USER2> 1\. Have a PC

2\. Call it a cloud server

3\. Congratulations, you are now 'in the cloud'

[https://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg)</comment>


Chattt – Easily chat with people from your terminal  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aviaryan/chattt <comment><AUTHOR> Chattt is a simple command line chat tool that works with absolutely no configuration. Do check it out and let me know if you have any comments.

PS - I also launched it on PH today. [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chattt](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chattt)

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks slick. Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks buddy. Do let me know if you have any suggestions.</comment></comment>


Camera Rollette  exchange random pictures from your camera roll with friends - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/camera-rollette-camera-roll-roulette/id1100993204?mt=8 <comment><USER2> Unable to locate in US App Store

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/camera-rollette-camera- roll-...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/camera-rollette-camera-roll- roulette/id1100993204?mt=8)</comment></comment>


How Twitter Killed My Fish - <AUTHOR> http://www.coldweatheraquaponics.com/2014/07/10/how-twitter-killed-my-fish/ <comment><USER2> More accurate title would be: How I Killed My Fish By Mistaking Twitter For A Reliable Messaging Platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi everyone. Author here. Gotta say I loved all the comments. My blog followers are all so nice. It feels good to get some real criticism for once :)

Relying on Twitter was a truly bonehead move, to be sure. Truly a "bang head here" kind of moment.

However, if trusting Twitter was the only "poor engineering decision" I had made I'd be a very happy man. It was just one of dozens of bonehead mistakes I made in building and operating my first aquaponics system.

Aquaponics is one of those things where the path of least resistance is definitely following a set of plans that are known to work. You can find one of those on my site, and some other places too. But I've never one to follow the path of least resistance (eg. Screw the round wheel - I'm making mine with fractals).

In case anyone's interested, I'm a former electrical engineer who used this as my first attempt at something with Arduino. More of a power-systems and lighting guy, software development was and still is a foreign land to me.

I could have tested and researched the reliability of different notification platforms, but at the time I was building it I was already staying up late fixing plumbing problems and trying to get those d*&$ one-wire sensors to work consistently.

Thankfully I eventually got my plumbing and sensors working, and bungled along into into Zapier which has been absolutely bulletproof.

I think the truly useful lesson here is that if you ever meet anyone in aquaculture who can tell a good story at a party, plop yourself down and ask them if they've ever killed fish in any bizarre and interesting ways. Don't get up for drinks either because you won't want to miss anything. You'll be there all night.

</comment><comment><USER4> From the Twitter terms of service:

"The Twitter Entities make no warranty and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or any Content; (ii) any harm to your computer system, loss of data, or other harm that results from your access to or use of the Services or any Content; (iii) the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Services; and (iv) whether the Services will meet your requirements or be available on an uninterrupted, secure, or error-free basis."

Clearly it was never meant as a reliable communications channel for any sort of M2M application where failure could result in significant economic loss or a threat to human health or life.

<comment><USER5> That just means you can't sue them. I'm sure any service can think of has a similar warning in their ToS. Did he have any reason to believe Twitter was more likely to fail than whatever alternative?

<comment><USER4> > Did he have any reason to believe Twitter was more likely to fail

Whether or not Twitter is more or less reliable than any similar alternative doesn't really matter that much, especially if none of the alternatives offer anything more than best-effort service with no guarantee of reliability.

The fact that Twitter was (at least superficially) suitable for this sort of application was probably not intended by Twitter's developers, nor was the existence of the pathological corner case that ruined OP's fish tank anything more than a unfortunate coincidence.

It absolutely sucks that OP's fish died, but if Twitter explicitly disavows any sort of loss because of the possibility that their service might change or fail, it's doesn't seem reasonable to just ignore that and assume otherwise. Especially for an application where it doesn't matter if the service is up _most_ of the time if it ends up failing during the brief period where it's needed the most. And if you are aware of the limitations of some aspect of your system, it then becomes possible to design redundancy into the other parts to compensate. I hope OP's next fishtank adventure keeps this in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And that is a fine example of why you don't rely on such a Rube Goldberg machine for stuff like this...

A poor engineering decision killed the fish.

I see all sorts of crazy contraptions people have rigged up over the last 5 years since the appearance of the 'maker movement'. Surprised that fish are the only victim so far!

Sure you can wire up your coffee machine to listen for a tweet and have coffee ready for when you get in... then when you get there your flat is on fire...

Excuse the cynicism but as a professional engineer it scares me how dangerously and poorly thought out some of this sort of stuff is.

<comment><USER7> The number of professional engineers we have is vastly too small to make good use of the enormous power that computers have handed us in the last 20 years.

I see our options as: a) be condescending dicks every time a novice makes a novice mistake, b) leave enormous amounts of technical value untapped until professionals can get around to it, or c) use our professional engineering smarts to build tools that amateur engineers can succeed with. I favor C.

<comment><USER2> There are really two versions of A:

A1) Be assholes.

A2) Point out mistakes to share the benefit of your experience.

The problem is that people have a real hard time distinguishing between A1 and A2, and this drives a lot of people to say that we shouldn't even try for A2, and just try to build stuff so people can learn from our experience without the troublesome burden of communicating with us.

<comment><USER7> Good point. I think A2 can be distinguished from A1 if the writer is willing to put in a little work. Some of the best lessons I learned were from people saying, "Oh, yeah, I made a mistake like that once. Here's how I think about it now. And let me tell you the story of an even bigger mistake I made."

But that sort of compassionate oral tradition only takes us so far. The number of people who will ever approach the level of a professional engineer is small. I think if we want to squeeze the full value out of digital technology, it's going to have to be approachable to the non-expert. Being compassionate in discussion can help there, but I think it's even more important to be compassionate in _construction_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is absolutely ridiculous. Why on earth would you rely on something like Twitter to get critical messages delivered?

<comment><USER7> Because you are somebody whose expertise is aquaculture, not software development? Because Twitter is the thing you use? Because the docs weren't clear? Because the APIs weren't really thought through for use cases like this?

<comment><USER9> If the guy put together an Arduino with custom software to control his aquaponics system and interface with services on the internet, I would venture to guess that he has _some_ expertise in software development. Enough not to make such a terrible mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More like how not having a heartbeat message that confirms Twitter-based notifications are working killed the fish. And why Twitter? Seems like any of email, IM, or SMS would be a better choice.

This is like not starting your emergency generators on a regular schedule and then being surprised that the fuel filter clogged.

<comment><USER7> This is one of those comments that relies on hindsight to sound smart, so it's frustrating to me. The author surely can also think up a solution now that he knows Twitter can't be trusted. In fact, as he explains in the comments, he switched to SMS months ago.

<comment><USER2> Realizing that Twitter is not reliable is not hindsight! It is blatantly obvious! In terms of reliability, it's one step above putting a message in a bottle and tossing it in the ocean. If you didn't already know this then you're not paying attention.

<comment><USER7> Here I take it "blatantly obvious" is code for "thing I know" or, less charitably, "thing I can claim to know so I can sound superior, now that it's obvious in hindsight". If you want to persuade me that it's really obvious, that only a fool would make this mistake, you'd have to show me where in the Twitter developer docs they say, "Hey, this is unreliable, so don't think we're going to actually deliver your messages". And then that a reasonable person would have had to see that page, read it, and ignore it before proceeding.

Half of people are below average. Everybody is ignorant about most things, and they're always learning. I have no reason to think that this guy didn't make a reasonable novice mistake. I'd rather encourage novices to try things. Telling them after the fact, "Fool, you should have known!" only discourages them and other novices.

Personally, I appreciate him producing an interesting article that will help other novices avoid his mistake.

<comment><USER2> Twitter's terms of service are located here: [https://twitter.com/tos](https://twitter.com/tos)

Two choice bits:

"We may suspend or terminate your accounts or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any reason...."

"The Twitter Entities make no warranty and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, _availability_ , timeliness, security or _reliability_ of the Services or any Content...."

Emphasis added.

Now I guess you'll say that a reasonable person won't read the TOS anyway so it doesn't count. And I say, that's all well and good when you're tweeting about last night's dinner, but when you're building something where you actually care about the consequences when it fails, you have to actually perform some form of research if you want reliability.

I'm rather astonished that you're still acting like Twitter's unreliability is not only non-obvious, but something I wasn't aware of until I read this post, but am pretending that I knew before so I could act superior. Do you just assume that every random internet service out there is reliable until proven otherwise? Because that's the opposite of what's correct. Everything is completely unreliable until proven otherwise. This is, yes, obvious if you've been paying attention to the internet for any reasonable length of time. Twitter hasn't proven otherwise, therefore it is unreliable. I personally think that more than passes the threshold for "blatantly obvious".

I disagree with you on the impact of pointing out that this was a bad decision. The fact that you can't rely on random internet services is an important lesson, and I don't think he learned that lesson. He just switched from one random unreliable internet service to another. When Zapier or Xively go down or change authentication requirements or decide he's a spammer and shut down his account, does he have some way to find out?

I would much rather have someone tell me "that was pretty stupid of you, this was your real mistake here" than hide the truth from me because they're afraid of discouraging me. I want to be wrong for as little time as possible. Apparently this is an unusual sentiment, which I have a hard time coming to terms with.

<comment><USER7> Every TOS says something like that, and there are reasonable interpretations that don't include "we will silently break your shit". Even if he had read it, this particular failure case might not have occurred to him.

The third option, one between "you're stupid" and hiding the truth, is to not be a dick about it. The only way people get to the point of being experts is by making a lot of mistakes. If you'd like somebody to listen to your wisdom, there are better approaches than starting out with "that was pretty stupid of you". Especially when it was not in fact pretty stupid of him.

<comment><USER2> Tell me more about these reasonable interpretations that don't include "we will silently break your shit". Because my understanding of the sentence ending in "at any time for any reason" can be paraphrased as "we will silently break your shit if and when we feel like it".

And, well, we're starting to get repetitive, but I disagree with the premise of the second paragraph. Building a service like this that relied entirely on Twitter (and the local internet provider and the local power company and whatever else) with no way to find out if it stopped working was pretty stupid. Yes, it's the sort of mistake a lot of people make, but that doesn't mean it's not-stupid. Pointing out that it was stupid conveys that the ultimate problem was not in choice of service but in the thought process in how the problem was considered and how the solution was conceived.

Maybe there are more tactful ways of pointing out "you didn't think this through very well". But hell if I know what they are (the thing I just said is not IMO any nicer than "that was dumb") and hell if I'm going to put a bunch of effort into figuring it out for a throwaway internet comment.

<comment><USER7> The word "will" is wrong. The TOS is more reasonably interpreted as "we _can_ shut down tomorrow, and _might_ break your shit". They're saying that they won't assume the user's financial liability if things break. Pretty much every modern web TOS looks like that.

Unless you have some sort of objective measure, calling something "stupid" is just your way of feeling smart at somebody's expense. It's a dick move.

The more useful standard is "reasonable", as in the legal term "reasonable mistake". Here, I think he made a reasonable novice mistake. Being a dick to reasonable novices does not reduce the number of mistakes; it just decreases the number of novices who will actually ask. And also the number who will post articles like this, ones useful in educating other reasonable novices.

I'll add that if you aren't willing to put any effort into a comment, maybe you just shouldn't make it. You can just say out loud, "Boy, that was stupid," enjoy feeling superior, and move on. If you're going to the extra effort of pissing all over somebody in public, then you might as well go all the way and make a useful comment. Or even a compassionate one. That those things are hard for you is only about what you've decided to get good at, not what's actually easy or hard.

<comment><USER2> I'm not allowed to make subjective statements? What the hell?

I like how you do everything you criticize. You keep saying I shouldn't say things are "stupid" because it'll hurt the poor guy's feelings and it's subjective anyway and people won't learn that way. But you have no qualms calling my comment "a dick move", as if that was somehow an objective fact, and then acting like I'm supposed to learn from _your_ comment even though the guy who wrote the article is not supposed to learn from mine.

Honestly, lead by example or go away. You're not helping by committing every sin you accuse me of while claiming to be trying to educate me.

<comment><USER7> I'm not inclined to allow to you make subjective statements as if they were objective. If you want to say, "I think you're stupid for making a mistake like that," then say it. Then it will be obviously dickish. And I'm also not inclined to let dickish statements, sutble or overt, go unchallenged, because it interferes with one of my goals, which is that novice programmers experience a helpful and supportive community, so that they grow up to be accomplished ones.

That an action is dickish is indeed factual. The guy attempted to make a positive contribution to our collective dialog by offering a story of his mistake. That took bravery and generosity. You admit you made a lazy negative comment, one you now seem to realize wouldn't help him. You were, in the words of Urban Dictionary, being "brash and insensitive", "put[ting] your own interests" first.

Your last paragraph is especially funny. By your own standards, my behavior is apparently fine, but still you complain. If you think it's ok to call somebody's mistakes stupid, surely I can point out your mistakes using negative tone. Funny how you think negativity is wrong when you're on the receiving end of it.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't care about your negative tone if 1) you weren't talking about how bad a negative tone is and 2) if you were making any kind of decent argument.

I care about substance. Your comments have none. Thus they are irritating.

You're not inclined to "allow" me to make subjective statements as if they were objective? What do you think you are, the Internet Police? Go away before I laugh at you a second time.

<comment><USER7> You're the one who brought up "allow", so I can't say what you mean by it. What I mean is that I'm disinclined to let your dickishness go by unchallenged.

Your "OMG hypocrisy" routine is cheap and lazy rhetoric. I'm not saying a negative tone is universally bad. I'm saying that replying dickishly to a positive novice contribution harms the dialog by reducing future novice contributions. Whereas I think negative tone in reply to a dickish comment can help the dialog by reducing future frequency of dickish replies.

If you don't like being irritated by people calling you out to being a dick to noobs, maybe you could try stopping being a dick to noobs. Then we can all be less irritated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is just the beginning. Connecting things to the Internet is a whole new kettle of fish and there is lots for the novice developer to learn. There will be disasters of all scales. So we need a new school of thought.

</comment><comment><USER12> So, you let a bird guard a fish?</comment>


Ad-blocking ruled legal in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://thestack.com/ad-blocking-ruled-legal-german-court-220415

<comment><USER2> The fact that this is even up for debate is depressing.

Content being displayed on my computer is mine. I can photoshop the actors in a movie into different colours. I can replace all instances of Bernard with Dave. And I will. If you think that justifies a response with guns and cages, you are ill.

<comment><USER3> Illegal doesn't always mean arrestable or police involvement. It might just mean a company could sue for loss of earnings.

[In the UK] downloading a movie is illegal but not arrestable until you do it as part of trade - burning the movie to a bunch of DVDs and selling them for example.

Until then the rights owners can sue for loss of earnings (one DVD downloaded, about £10 per DVD) and that's about it.

While I'm ad tolerant I agree that this court case is horrible. Some advertisers are scum and cases like this don't help them.</comment></comment>


How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks - <AUTHOR> http://brianbalfour.com/post/2813742577/core-groups

<comment><USER2> This is an outstanding article. The idea of a core group containing people genuinely interested in all members' success is absolutely compulsory to launch a great product. The whole thing is true honesty and openness; you have to be able to completely trust, on many levels, the people in your group.

My group contains friends I've known since college, from a variety of unrelated majors. We all work on different projects, but we keep in constant contact and offer to each other the brutal honesty that members of our respective teams could not otherwise offer. Additionally, we use each of our unique experiences to identify new problems, and new areas that might be worth pursuing. It's an incredible feeling.

Actually, for a long time, I've been thinking about creating a site that facilitates pairing people together for this purpose. I've been throwing around a few ideas for it, and have a pretty decent idea churning in the back of my mind. How interested would you guys be in a site like okcupid for entrepreneurs?

<comment><USER3> I'm working on a site that is, in part, attempting to help match entrepreneurs with one another based on mutually beneficial skills. We're still in alpha, so there is a long way to go yet. I think not having a real life connection makes these relationships take longer to cultivate online, if it is even possible at all. I'm hoping that having a material goal, a startup idea in our case, will energize people to start the bonding process though.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the hardest problem is addressing the issue of trust. As a culture, we're inherently wary of people we "meet" online. While the problem is indeed technologically feasible, it's overcoming the cultural differences that would make or break any solution.

Moreover, the idea of "start-up" itself is too abstract -- would you focus on tech start-ups mostly? How would your site handle funding? What about scammers? It's an idea I'll probably think about for a couple months, and hopefully write some more about soon.

<comment><USER3> The working together part comes first, then the connecting. Purely doing matchmaking is too hard and inaccurate imo, it is easier to find things that people find mutually interesting and get them engaged together through it.

My site is largely unconcerned with funding right now, there are already excellent resources to get it. And scammers would be wasting their time: much like most startups, lots of people try really hard and get nothing out of it. Why scam the guy you will have to work hard to help and will probably get nothing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought for sure this was a joke headline from DanielBMarkham's linkbait generator: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112277>

<comment><USER5> Sure, but it's a great and insightful article...probably one of the best I've read on HN in a while

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the compliment. Really appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find having core peer groups (I like to call them "cronies" just for kicks) to be invaluable. We share with each other information about our businesses and challenges we face that we wouldn't share with others. We check in with one another and hold each other accountable.

I like to think of it as like being investors in each other's companies, but with no money exchanging hands, and no complicated term sheets. Each success for one of us results in more success for all of us.

</comment><comment><USER8> So if you add in the time it took to find your Core Peer Group who could make all that happen in four weeks, how long did it really take you?

<comment><USER6> I knew the Betahouse crew for about 3 - 4 months prior. But from conception of the idea for Viximo to completion of the three items in the title, it was actually less than 4 weeks.

I view the core group as a long term investment for whatever you are working on. I didn't build the core group just to execute the particular idea for Viximo. In fact, if I think you go into it with that mentality, you are setting yourself up for failure at the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have found this exact thing to be true. I launched my first (fulltime) startup this past summer, and the insight of my "core group" was simply brilliant. I ended up asking 3 of them to join my board, and they have not only helped me avoid mistakes, but steered me into a profitable direction as well.

Great article Brian, the breadth of this article is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER10> What the author didn't dig into was the selection of core groups, and how we choose a group that best serves us as individuals and that we can best contribute to.

How does one move between core groups, how many can you be an active member of at once?

<comment><USER6> I actually have a follow up post exploring that. I felt like having them combined was waayyyy too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Key sentence FTA: _I had previously started a few companies with angel funding and a couple small exits, but certainly nothing of scale._

He didn't raise $5M in 4 weeks, it took years of laying the groundwork.

<comment><USER6> Vannevar,

If you asked my investors about my history prior to Viximo, they wouldn't have a clue what I had done. It didn't matter. In any case, the point of the article isn't the exact timing of these things, it was a demonstration of what core groups can do. I spent a lot of time evaluating how/why what happened, happened (including my personal history). And I can honestly say, this was the one thing that was 90% of the cause.

<comment><USER11> With all due respect, you don't just waltz into someone's office with an idea, no matter how good it is, and get $5M. You absolutely have to have connections to even get the meeting. Whether the connections were yours from your past history or one of your partners, the point is that it was not the instant success the headline makes it out to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great article on things you would/should generally do as an entrepreneur, but Id have actually seen bit more of a break down (daily perhaps) on actually work done towards the particular app/product.</comment>


AC Power filter and phone line filter (homemade circuit breaker) - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/ac-power-filter-and-phone-line-filter-homemade-circuit-breaker <comment><AUTHOR> AC-Safe can protect or filter the phone line and protect or filter the ac power supply (mains), from lightnings (or surges) and extra currents. Toss in a few modifications, and also noise coming from power lines can be easily filtered.</comment>


Atheism as a Stealth Religion - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/2009/10/atheism_as_a_stealth_religion.php

<comment><USER2> "brains evolved by natural selection, their main purpose is to cause organisms to behave adaptively in the real world--not to directly represent the real world"

Sounds familiar: The following is from wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_n...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism))

"[W]ith me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" – Charles Darwin

Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism began with the observation that our beliefs can only have evolutionary consequences if they affect behaviour. Natural selection does not directly select for true beliefs, but rather for advantageous behaviours. Therefore any belief we hold, being a product of evolution, is as likely right as wrong.

Plantinga distinguished the various theories of mind-body interaction into four jointly exhaustive categories:

1) Epiphenomenalism, where behaviour is not caused by beliefs: "if this way of thinking is right, beliefs would be invisible to evolution" so the proposition that our faculties are "reliable" would be unsupported.

2) Semantic epiphenomenalism, where beliefs have a causative link to behaviour but not by virtue of their semantic content: Under this theory, a belief would be some form of long-term neuronal event. However, on this view the proposition that our faculties are "reliable" would be unsupported because the semantic content of beliefs would be invisible to natural selection, and it is semantic content that determines truth-value.

3) Beliefs are causally efficacious with respect to behaviour, but maladaptive, in which case the proposition that our faculties are "reliable" would be unsupported.

4) Beliefs are causally efficacious with respect to behaviour and also adaptive, but they may still be false: Since behaviour is caused by both belief and desire, and desire can lead to false belief, natural selection would have no reason for selecting true but non-adaptive beliefs over false but adaptive beliefs. Thus the proposition that our faculties are "reliable" in this case would also be unsupported. Plantinga pointed out that innumerable belief-desire pairs could account for a given behaviour; for example, that of a prehistoric hominid fleeing a tiger:

Perhaps Prehistoric Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. [...] Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. [...] Clearly there is any number of belief- desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.

Thus, Plantinga argued, the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is unsupported. Therefore, to assert that naturalistic evolution is true also asserts that one has an insupportability of being right. This, Plantinga argued, epistemically defeats the belief that naturalistic evolution is true and that ascribing truth to naturalism and evolution is internally dubious or inconsistent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Towards the end of the article it says: "I am also involved in the establishment of evolutionary religious studies as an authentic scientific discipline"

From that sentence I understand that he is in fact trying to combine creation and evolutionary theory and call it a science. And to achieve that he must attack atheism.

Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.

<comment><USER4> And the people did rejoice, for the irony of this guy labelling atheism as a stealth religion was not lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like setting up a strawman version of atheism, and then logically destroying the strawman as a method of apologetics.

I'm not buying it.

</comment><comment><USER4> That'll be why atheism is not the final step in understanding the world and/or your/our place in it. Next?

<comment><USER3> For religious people, religion IS the final step in understanding the world. That means that if you don't understand something or don't know something, you explain that with religion and your god/gods and don't look for a better explanation.

Many "misteries" explained by religion in ancient times are now explained by science. Of course science does not yet answer every question, but keeps asking, when religion cuts questions.</comment></comment>


How Depressions Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/depressions

<comment><USER2> Isn't this just a point-for-point paraphrase of a Paul Krugman article, about the same co-op? He didn't even _cite_ Krugman, or the journal article Krugman cited for the same story.

<comment><USER3> Oops, I meant to add footnotes. Sweeney and Sweeney is here:

[http://cda.morris.umn.edu/~kildegac/Courses/M&B/Sweeney%...](http://cda.morris.umn.edu/~kildegac/Courses/M&B/Sweeney%20&%20Sweeney.pdf)

It's an awesome paper.

<comment><USER2> It is an awesome paper, but it doesn't appear to be your primary source --- which you haven't yet cited (it's "Babysitting the Economy", Krugman in Slate from '98, about the Asian crisis).

For example, unlike Krugman, the original paper doesn't state that the co-op is mostly lawmakers and lawyers (only that lawyers drafted the bylaws); unlike your post and Krugman's article, the paper also doesn't talk about legislation.

More importantly, the paper's thesis isn't Krugman's thesis, or yours. The paper seems to be making the point that the implicit economies that develop from social interactions are often destined to flail because people don't recognize them _as_ economies, and insist on applying moral reasoning to technical problems.

But your thesis --- and Krugman's --- is different. Obviously, we recognize The Economy as _an_ economy. So what Krugman is saying is that this story illustrates something about _how to resolve a depression_.

Which it very well might. It's not like I'm going to question Krugman on it.

(You did cite Krugman's anthology book, which I haven't read but might contain this article).

<comment><USER4> > _might contain this article_

Pretty sure it does. The story seems familiar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Deja vu: <http://www.slate.com/id/1937/>

</comment><comment><USER6> If you cut away all the economist talk and get down to the core of the problem it's very very simple: For the last 8 years America has been spending more than it has made. Production is not up to world standards, just look at the auto industry.

Bailing out companies and fiscal stimulus of one sort or another won't save you from the basic and indeniable problem: You're broke.

There's only one way out of that: Spend less and work more.

</comment><comment> cool-RR In the "scrip" economy, couldn't they just let the value of the scrip change organically? If scrips are getting too precious, you can tell your babysitter that he'll be getting one scrip per two hours instead of one hour. If scrips are indeed that rare, he'll accept it, and the scrip-time ratio will naturally reflect the scarcity of scrips. Since this thing does happen with Dollars, I reckon his analogy is bad, and adding more Dollars won't solve the problem.

<comment><USER7> You've got it. I made the same point a few weeks ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421617>. It doesn't seem like rocket science, but maybe it is; the vast majority of economists, including Nobelists like Krugman, just don't seem to get it.

<comment><USER8> I made almost the exact same comment you made: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/6oba0/its_ten_yea...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/6oba0/its_ten_years_old_but_its_still_probably_the_best/c04fkgp)

<comment><USER7> Great minds think alike. And so do ours. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's one facet another is how deflation and loans mix. In effect deflation increases interest rates just as inflation decreases them. If you owe 1$ @ 5% over a year with 50% deflation you now owe 2.1 times the value of what you bought. Once deflation starts people start trying to pay back their debt because their effective interest rate increased. Which decreases the money supply and causes even more deflation. This cycle can quickly get extremely nasty with most people defaulting.

The free market dampener is people refinancing at slightly lower rates, but this this hits a wall. Negative interest rates never happens, because why lend money when you can just keep it. And even mild deflation is hard to deal with because loans have risk so you can't lower loans below the rate of risk.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Keynes suggested stuffing bills into bottles and burying them down mineshafts."

Can someone explain how such an action would _help_ the economy?

<comment><USER11> to get at the money, one would have to employ people and buy equipment.

<comment><USER12> Yep, that's it.

It would be nice if these people did something useful, but Keynes' point was that this is an _optional feature_ which should not be allowed to detract from the main goal.

<comment><USER10> The main goal being getting money circulating again?

But why should that be a main goal? Why have money changing hands for the sake of changing hands? Isn't money just a medium of exchange -- a go-between, a currency -- used to convert one type of good into another? We don't just want money to circulate, we want money to circulate purposefully -- in transactions on the free market.

I still don't see how burying money and having miners dig it up helps anything. It doesn't create value. Those miners could do other, more productive things instead.

<comment><USER12> _Isn't money just a medium of exchange...used to convert one type of good into another?_

I'm tempted to answer "no". Money has properties -- the very ones that prompted its design -- that make an exchange of money quite different from an exchange of goods or services.

The important property for this discussion is: an exchange of services doesn't offer you a reliable medium of _savings_. If I offer to shingle your house in exchange for you shoveling my snow, but it's January and I can't shingle the house until May, we're stuck. You can shovel the snow first and have me _owe_ you the shingling, but what if I flee the state, or injure myself? Or what if May comes around and you have decided that you'd rather have the lawn redone than the shingles replaced? I don't know lawns! I only do shingles!

But money solves this problem because you can put it in the bank (or a piggy bank, for that matter) and decide later what to trade it for and with whom.

Which leads directly to the problem we're worried about: deflation. Right now is a very bad time to hire someone to reshingle my house for $75 an hour, because in six months another 3-5 million people will be out of work and there will be a lot more unemployed people with building skills, some of whom might be willing to reshingle my house for $50 an hour. But, of course, at that point I might be out of work myself, and $50 might seem like a lot of money, but no problem, because if I wait _another_ six months the price might be down to $25 an hour...

In a depression people hoard their money, because there isn't a lot coming in and because it's worth more the longer you wait. That's the phenomenon which Keynesian stimulus seeks to prevent. You have to offer folks $50 an hour (or whatever) to do _anything_ \-- twiddle their thumbs, if necessary -- to keep money flowing into and through the system and to fight the universal tendency toward deflationary deadlock: The situation where everyone sits on their cash and their labor, waiting.

(Since the 1930s, we've prevented our economy from falling into this terrible state by using monetary policy. But you can't use monetary policy to maintain equilibrium once the real interest rate is zero. Which it apparently now is.)

Unfortunately, a depression is one of those nonlinear, non-equilibrium, black- swan situations that relatively few living Americans have experienced, and we're seeing the very real danger that people will refuse to recognize the possibility this time until it's too late. You have to _anticipate_ these things, because economies have a lot of momentum.

<comment><USER10> A _medium_ of exchange, not an exchange itself. A medium: "a means or instrumentality for storing or communicating information." Money enables the storage and communication of information about exchanges, as posited by your example.

As for deflation: Isn't there a cost to not reshingling your house? You don't have a reshingled house, something you presumably want. You shouldn't just look at the price of labor, you also have to look at the value of what the labor does: the house, reshingled. Compare that to the cost of reshingling the house. (Opportunity cost, in so many words).

I still fail to see the point of offering folks money to do something pointless, nor how it helps stop deflationary deadlock. If there's a deadlock then they'll just sit on that money as before, no?

I'm not sure I understand the deflationary deadlock -- you posit a situation where everyone sits on their cash and their labor, waiting -- waiting for what? Eventually someone is going to stop waiting and start working, eventually the gap between _desired state_ and _existing state_ will loom larger than the value of sitting on that money. In the house-shingling example, eventually you will value someone shingling your house for $X/hr today more than you will value having a not-reshingled house until the price drops to $Y/hr in Z days. When that point comes, you'll stop sitting on your money and hire someone to reshingle your house. Wouldn't a series of such events unlock the deflationary deadlock as the market reaches the new price point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _This isn't rocket science. Keynes suggested stuffing bills into bottles and burying them down mineshafts; Milton Friedman once proposed tossing cash out of helicopters. But as long as the government is spending money, we might as well spend it on something useful. And thus, fiscal stimulus._

I agree with printing money to halt the deflation. But this should not be done through government projects. If the money is spent via government projects, then you still get massive frictional unemployment as businesses shut down and and everyone has to find new jobs working for the government. Second, government spending has a ratchet effect. Government programs never die. Finally, I believe individuals know how to spend their money the best. Should money be spent on a high speed train from Boston to Washington, or should it be spent on healthcare? Just print money and give it to individuals and let each person decide.

<comment><USER13> As I recall, an article I read recently outlined a few key principles for such a monetary deployment (which Lawrence Summers apparently supported until he became part of the administration):

1) Must be able to start very soon

2) Must have a clear horizon (i.e. a project with a final deadline, so that it doesn't keep costing money forever)

3) Must be useful

One example it gave of the best way to spend that money would be actually to _repair_ existing roads. That's usually very easy to do right away, provides immediate short term benefits, and reduces your long term costs (unlike building roads, which increases them, as you then have to maintain all these new roads).

<comment><USER8> The point of monetary deployment should be balance sheet repair. Only when people's balance sheet's are repaired can normal spending resume and the layoffs stop. The point of an intervention now should not be to get the unemployment rate back down to 4%, but to prevent it from going to 15%. Therefore, the thing to do is to repair balance sheets by printing money. If you only give money to people repairing roads then consumer spending still drops off a cliff, and millions of people still lose their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A long response to Krugman's scrip example can be found here:

<http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/jan/12/00031/>

</comment><comment><USER15> "The moralists insist it's irresponsible for us to just print more money."

Actually economists, not moralists, are against this; because excessive pumping of money in they system in this way will cause hyper-inflation. Classical (and rather extreme) example of why printing money should be kept under check: Zimbabwe.

<comment><USER16> Everyone agrees that _excessive_ pumping of money into the system will cause inflation. The problem is figuring how how much is, in fact, excessive. And in a recession, you can't just say "let's err on the side of conservatism and not pump anything in" because there's the risk of deflation on the other side.

"We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice." —Woody Allen

<comment><USER15> Well, the fact that interest rates are nearing zero does indicate how must is _not_ enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yep, looks like it was a lack of money in circulation that caused the problem:

[http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=li...](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=line&s%5B1%5D%5Bid%5D=AMBNS&s%5B1%5D%5Btransformation%5D=pc1)

<comment><USER18> The velocity of money has dropped. I don't have the charts on hand, but you're citing that chart and making the wrong conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Aha.. I've seen the "interest rates can't go below zero" claim again. Is this really so? I've read it a lot, but surely a negative interest rate is possible by being paid interest to borrow money?

A negative interest rate, therefore, would be a bit like a formalized "helicopter drop". If the interest rate of a loan were tied to the nominal interest rate in some way, you wouldn't have millions borrowing as much as possible because the rates could well shift back in the other direction before long.

<comment><USER20> Some economists have proposed imposing a tax on cash holdings, which would theoretically push nominal interest rates negative... this would really give people an incentive to hold assets instead of cash.

[http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/11/the-case-for- negative-...](http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/11/the-case-for-negative- interest-rates-now/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Inflation is one way to solve a debt crisis. What ends up sacrificed is the reputation of the currency (dollar in this case). Our spending power as a nation will decline when the rest of the world demands more dollars for their goods.

I have wondered lately if this is why we are keeping our car companies alive: Massive inflation could make them cheaper than foreign cars.

<comment><USER22> He's proposing an expansion of the money supply, not inflation. It will only lead to inflation if the money is not withdrawn quickly enough as the economy recovers.

<comment><USER21> It's all relative. Expanding the money supply has an inflationary effect, even if the absolute effect is simply to slow deflation (which is still relative inflation).

<comment><USER22> Changes in the money supply do not appear to be correlated with short term inflation at all, so it's not certain that short term expansion will produce any effect.

<comment><USER15> But short term expansion will surely not be enough to quell the crisis. Also, the point that other commentators have made on falling value of the currency stands valid. At the moment, America is facing twin problems of slowing economy and mounting debt; whose classical "cure" point to different directions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How will this help us pay the 45 trillion dollars of combined public and private debt? Keep in mind our GDP is 13 trillion.

<comment><USER16> The Keynesian prescription, AIUI, actually has two sides: the government should run a deficit (when necessary) during a recession _and run a surplus during a recovery_.

It's a damn shame that the Bush Administration didn't follow the second half of this advice for the past eight years, but that's no reason to ignore the first half now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is just a muddled explanation of monetarism, which is pretty well clearly nonsense at this point. No macroeconomic developments of the last 100 years confirm it.

> We're not being punished for our exuberance

We're being "punished" for massive malinvestment. Wealth was poured into assets and ventures that could never achieve positive returns. A recession/depression is the process of liquidating malinvestments and redeploying wealth and labor to economically profitable ventures.

The malinvestment happens partly from mass psychology and mostly because of artificially manipulated interest rates. The natural market interest rate reflects the amount of wealth available for investment (capital). When people have saved a lot and there's a lot of wealth stored up, interest rates are low. When interest rates are _artificially_ held low, investors and business people get the mistaken impression there's much more stored wealth in the society than there actually is. Then eventually many business plans come to tears at roughly the same time, as it becomes apparent there isn't the wealth to drive demand for the ventures. This is a recession.

<comment><USER24> _A recession/depression is the process of liquidating malinvestments and redeploying wealth and labor to economically profitable ventures._

If what you say were true, then we wouldn't be suffering from unemployment. We'd suffer from massive writedowns in our wealth (as we realize our malinvestments) but labor would be redeployed to new ventures. Effectively, we'd be working our assess off harder than before, but receiving a lower quality of life in return.

In reality, however, the economy is not at full employment. If we malinvested before (effectively did useless work), that should be a sunk cost. We wouldn't receive the future benefits we expected from that work, but that wouldn't preclude us from continuing to work. Malinvestment is not a reason for unemployment.

No, we're in a liquidity trap. Option A is monetary policy. That has been tried and exhausted. Option B is fiscal policy. Bring out the helicopters!

<comment><USER25> _we wouldn't be suffering from unemployment... labor would be redeployed to new ventures_

Yes, but redeployment takes time -- especially when everyone looks around and sees all their assumptions about what profits different activities will return are wrong, and need to be recalibrated. That research -- which happens tentatively, experimentally at first -- means some capital/labor sits on the sidelines while the necessary information is collected or created.

Redeploying labor immediately at the first things you can think of might keep people busy but can worsen the wealth destruction, if those activities wind up being of net zero or negative benefit. (By tying up workers on make-work, they could also slow the rediscovery and restaffing of valuable projects.)

<comment><USER26> _redeployment takes time_

Those who have lost their jobs don't necessarily have the right skills for the more economically productive jobs that hopefully get created. Also, they don't necessarily live in the right places.

<comment><USER27> Not to mention that many who are in the right place and could profitably use new people are not sure of that fact, so they lack the confidence to bring in as many new people as they might otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> An alternative explanation:

<http://www.whereisthemoney.org>

You shouldn't just print money if it supports theft via nontransparent government accounting, impoverishes the many, and enriches the few.

Then you are just Zimbabwe 2.0.

Fix the accounting systems first, please.</comment>


JQuery 1.6.1 released... - <AUTHOR> http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#Current_Release

<comment><USER2> This release is a fudge, and a partial backwards step. The jQuery team seem uncertain about what the prop()/attr() change is trying to achieve (an uncertainty that probably stems from the uncertainty underlying the whole attr() method in the first place). The result is that the situation is even more confusing than ever, judging by the release notes: a list of properties for which you can only use prop() and then a recommendation that for everything else you should use attr(). Really?? Then what the hell was the point of this change? Having gone as far as acknowledging that properties are not attributes and supposedly separating how they are dealt with, they then continue to recommend using attr() even though properties are almost always what you actually want and there is now a dedicated prop() method for dealing with them? I'm now genuinely baffled as to what this change was supposed to achieve, and average jQuery users are going to be seriously confused by the messages coming from jQuery on this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, should have summarized changes:

1.6.1 addresses backwards compatibility issues with new 'attr()' and 'prop()' behaviour added in 1.6.

This means that code written against 1.5.2 will work 100% against 1.6.1 (this was not the case with 1.6).

So to many people this is quite an important update.

<comment><USER3> > code written against 1.5.2 will work 100% against 1.6.1

Nope. attr() returns a different value than it did before 1.6. Anything that relied on that value (eg $elem.attr('disabled') == true/false) is still going to break.

<comment><USER4> Actually == true and == false will still work, === true and === false will fail (as the return value is now "disabled" or undefined).

<comment><USER3> I meant, explicit checks on the return value will break (not that this is a bad thing). Specifically, neither `'disabled' == true` nor `undefined == false` will ever be true[thy] and are thus breaking changes.

Perhaps you meant implicit conversions to boolean still working? Eg `!!'disabled'`, `if ('disabled')`, `!!undefined`, or `if (undefined)` will continue to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like the right choice. As nice as it is to force code to make explicit distinctions between the two methods, something as popular as jQuery shouldn't cause code breakage in a single update. Deprecate, hint at the better way to do things, and wait for users to move toward the more modern approach.

<comment><USER6> Yes, this was the correct move. jQuery is for thinking less and doing more; the prop/attr distinction is both a painful code change and a needless complication for the sort of purposes that jQuery is used for.

<comment><USER2> Whether the property/attribute distinction is necessary for jQuery users is one question (I strongly believe it is), but if not, the correct move would be to remove the prop() method entirely, because according to the release notes it nows seems pretty much completely pointless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> jQuery releases new updates with light speed. VWO is built on top of jQuery. Just a couple of months before we had bleeding edge version (1.4.2) now looks like we need to update again.

Every time jQuery changes, it means extensive cross-browser testing for us agan.

<comment><USER8> You don't have to upgrade to every version that is released, unless your product is affected by a fixed bug (or performance improvement). jQuery isn't exactly a system library that could have a security hole making your web server exploitable remotely.

Unless of course "VWO" (you should provide a link or descriptive text when mentioning a TLA we might not recognise, BTW) is somehow sensitive to what version other people use on their sites so you have to test against _all_ versions.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I should have mentioned. VWO stands for our product Visual Website Optimizer. We internally prefer VWO over the full name since it is long and it kind of slipped while I was writing the comment.

You are right that we don't have to upgrade to every version but as you say performance improvement is sometimes very significant so we feel compelled to upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started to write a reply to some of the comments here but ended up turning it into a blog post: <http://ejohn.org/blog/jquery-16-and-attr/>

Looks like someone has submitted it to HN as well: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544698>

</comment><comment><USER9> Blog post: <http://blog.jquery.com/2011/05/12/jquery-1-6-1-released/></comment>


Ask HN: Can you suggest some good technical blogs to follow - <AUTHOR>

<comment> mike-cardwell I write a tech blog at <https://grepular.com/blog/>

Most tech blog seem to just talk about the current popular tech subject. Basically repeating news that you can read in dozens of other places.

I've tried to avoid turning my "tech blog" into a "tech news blog", and mostly just talk about things I've done or found myself. This seems to keep the content original and mostly interesting I think. At least I hope so.

Some of my more popular articles:

[https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri...](https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Private_Information)

[https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sop...](https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sophisticated_Attacks)

I discovered and reported the LastPass vulnerability last year which lead to them making loads of major changes to their infrastructure:

[https://grepular.com/LastPass_Vulnerability_Exposes_Account_...](https://grepular.com/LastPass_Vulnerability_Exposes_Account_Details)

And was the blog which started the shit-storm about Dropbox mobiles lack of security:

[https://grepular.com/Dropbox_Mobile_Less_Secure_Than_Dropbox...](https://grepular.com/Dropbox_Mobile_Less_Secure_Than_Dropbox_Desktop)

I have different feeds for different categories of post depending on what you like to read about:

<https://grepular.com/feeds/>

I think that's enough self promotion for now ;)

</comment><comment><USER2> This will introduce you to some good Ruby blogs:

<http://planetrubyonrails.com>

Although not blogs, there are some nice email newsletters that are good for keeping you in the loop:

<https://cooperpress.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any field you're particularly interested in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the stuff that I tend to find using Google is more about the things/features/products that tech companies are dishing out. However, I don't get blogs that are more into the technical details like Algos, architecture, design, programming etc.

There are a few goods posts on HN every now and then, but would love people to share what interesting technical feeds they follow regularly.</comment></comment>


Loopt strikes a deal to make massive use of GPS data cost effective - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/24/loopt-strikes-a-deal-to-make-massive-use-of-gps-data-cost-effective/ <comment><USER2> I'm confused here. I assume a "dip" is actually cell phone triangulation rather than GPS? (The media never seems to know the difference between the two, and calls anything that tries to figure out where you are "GPS".) There's no reason why actual GPS should have a per-usage fee and need approval from the cell carriers right?

<comment><USER3> Eric Carr from Loopt discusses the various positioning technologies available on mobile phones in depth on TechCrunch:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/04/location- technologies-p...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/04/location-technologies- primer/)

Actual (unassisted) GPS is free when the device supports it, but is typically slow to first fix, power intensive, and rarely works indoors.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps they meant assisted GPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> GPS data is as close to "free" as you can get. It's a one-way satellite-to- earth transmission; bandwidth speeds are huge, and the size of the data transferred is minimal.

Consider the number of free satellite TV broadcasts. Take into account the sheer size of the hi-def audio/video feeds. Compare that to a latitude/longitude packet sent from a GPS satellite.... see what I mean?

<comment><USER5> The amount of "data" (whatever that means) might be small, but it's a highly redundant signal, that's the way it works. You can't compare the two.</comment></comment>


Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000's, and Seven More to Come  - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/12/24/exponentials-r-us-seven-computer-science-game-changers-from-the-2000%E2%80%99s-and-seven-more-to-come/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I'd say another big game changer is going to be APIs becoming ubiquitous. A lot of sites are already doing this, but in the next few years, expect even more open APIs from even more sites. Screen scraping should become largely a thing of the past. I expect the Internet to take on a Unix philosophy with web apps becoming very well suited at individual tasks instead of kitchen-sink type applications. Information will be passed in XML (plain text or gzipped), apps will be strung together fairly easily if we keep pushing for RESTful APIs, and the winners will be the people that build on other sites in useful and ingenious ways.

You can already see this with Twitter. A social networking site that is basically just the status field from Facebook being utilized for all sorts of other tasks because they have an open API. Expect to see more sites take individual features from other sites (or create completely new features) and build really great services with just _that_ feature.

For this to happen, a ubiquitous login is going to have to really take hold, but I already see that happening with Facebook Connect. It's proprietary, but they've already reached critical mass and it doesn't break the username/password paradigm that people are used to. OpenID, while great in concept, is going to lose because people aren't used to having a URL represent them.

</comment><comment><USER3> s/Computer Science/Technology/ perhaps?

<comment><USER4> Agreed. "E-commerce" is not computer science, it's an application thereof.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Live Air Traffic Over the SF Bay Area - <AUTHOR> https://concorde.io/radar <comment><USER2> Is it really "live" if it's only "updated every 5-10 minutes while the Concorde team is online"?

With a Raspberry Pi and a $20 USB SDR, one can have their own real-time map of air traffic. I've got four of 'em deployed already and have a few more I need to get set up. I'm an aviation nerd as well, so it's very cool to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Real-time is definitely not accurate, but I'd be willing to say 5-10 minutes delayed is as close to a "live" view as is legally allowed.

Did you built your Raspberry Pi stations with FlightAware's guide?

[https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build](https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build)

<comment><USER2> I loosely followed their guide, yes. I put their PiAware image on the Pi but the hardware is a little different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does your cheap flight deals work. I found the cheapest fare for mumbai from you !

Do you have similar deals from NY

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Glad that you found a great deal via Concorde! At the moment, we are posting deals by user demand. We have had a handful of requests for deals originating in the NYC area, so we are planning to start posting deals from NYC airports in the next week or so. Keep reminding us!

Thanks for checking out Concorde!</comment></comment>


Transit of Venus - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/2012-venus-transit.html A sight that probably no one currently alive will see again, the next is 2117. <comment><USER2> I watched the transit in 2004 - fascinating. Sadly, pretty much the whole of the UK is forecast to be completely covered with cloud at sunrise, when the transit will be in its final stages, and I probably won't get to see it.

I'll be trying. I can drive up to about 6 hours to get to any point that's got a good chance of seeing through the clouds. So I'm watching the forecast, and hoping it works.

I'd like to have seen both transits.

<comment><USER3> Cloud; rain in Birmingham and so it goes, but I'll be up early on Wednesday.

Roughly projected image from 2004 just after second contact - improvised with finder and cardboard early on as I had to attend a Very Important Meeting that day (about what totally forgotten).

[http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/images/venus_transit...](http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/images/venus_transit.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone else noticed that a "once in a lifetime" astronomical event happens about every 6 months?

<comment><USER5> Improbable things happen pretty often in the universe :)

<comment><USER6> The sheer scale of the universe does funny things with probability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried to figure out when to see this where I am, and found the easiest way was to install Stellarium and then fast forward in time to see how the pass happens.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those wanting to view the transit and not permanently lose their sight, there are a few ways to watch it+. I personally prefer option 6:

1 use of eclipse shades

2 pinhole projectors

3 project a magnified view

4 project a magnified image through a closed-loop device

5 viewed directly when magnified

6 live webcast

\+ <http://www.transitofvenus.org/june2012/eye-safety>

<comment><USER9> If you can't find eclipse shades, you can grab some #14 shade welding glass from a local welding supplier - a piece of 4" x 5" shouldn't cost you much more than about $3.</comment></comment>


Tone of Voice Guide - <AUTHOR> https://monzo.com/tone-of-voice/ <comment><USER2> > In our technical work we use 'allowlist' and 'blocklist' instead of > 'whitelist' and 'blacklist.' That's because of the origin of these terms, > with white being seen as 'good' and black being seen as 'bad.'

This is one of these times where I'm confused about my own thinking, and am seeking advice "what should I think?". I think "allowlist" and "blocklist" are actually clearer, but I also struggle to accept that white/black, or light/dark cannot be used as general symbols for good/bad.

Edit: this reddit question and a lengthy answer talks about the "origins" \-- they are not racial, and consistently meant allow/block: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/866ynp/what_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/866ynp/what_are_the_origins_of_the_words_blacklist_and/)

<comment><USER3> Historically, white/blacklist did not have racial origins, but history is always happening. The original intent of a word can be erased by its proximity to new taboos and new circumstances, and in this case, white/black have been racialized.

See also: the disappearance of the words "niggardly" and "feck" from common English usage, or how Thais are uneasy using the word "fuk" (gourd, pumpkin) [0]

[0] [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808190.013.10](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808190.013.10)

<comment><USER4> In our own industry, too, "master/slave" being gradually replaced by "primary/replica", "primary/secondary", etc. There was a lot of similar red- top-style complaining about "political correctness gone mad!" in the early days of that change, too. Now the new terms are totally unremarkable, and it's a real surprise to encounter the old.

As you say, history is always happening. My days of talking about "whitelists" and "blacklists", modulo the occasional slip as I start modifying my lexical habit, are done.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the reminder of this. In the last release of my software, we renamed all the "slave" objects to be "masters", without any real thought to the connected social implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article; will keep this in mind for my email/Slack messages at work.

One nitpick:

> The Romans arrived in Britain a couple of thousand years ago, and brought > Latin with them. Local tribal leaders had to learn Latin, or else. So they > did, and Latin became the language of religion and administration — which is > why the words 'religion' and 'administration' come from Latin.

I'd argue the Normans have much more to do with that; the Romans might've brought Latin with them, sure, but the Old English that came after the Romans lost control was chiefly Germanic (especially considering prior conquests/arrivals by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, all of whom spoke Germanic languages). The much-more-recent Norman conquests are what "Latinized" English, by enforcing French as the language of administration (and Latin as the language of religion, as it was for as long as the Catholic Church existed up until the Protestant Reformation made non-Latin languages acceptable for church).

Further, at the time of the Roman conquest few (if any) people in what's now England were speaking anything resembling English; the native peoples of the British Isles were Celtic, and accordingly spoke a Celtic language, very different from any Germanic language like English.

<comment><USER7> I agree. I read the same passage and had the same complaint.

I just finished a Great Courses lecture series on the Norman conquest of England, and the professor makes this very comment. And also argues that the melding of Norman--not 'French', Norman was a sister to Old French that looks more like Vulgar Latin--and Old English is what gives modern English its vast vocabulary, roughly twice the size of Spanish; as many words have the Germanic and Romance varieties. You can 'meet' someone or 'encounter' someone, etc.

Ironically, "Norman" comes from "north men", as Normandy was settled by Scandinavian invaders who "went native" in France. Then they "went native" again in England, forgetting their original Norman.

<comment><USER6> > not 'French', Norman was a sister to Old French that looks more like Vulgar > Latin

I mean, at that point in time it might as well be "French", right? Obviously not modern French, but an ancestor (or uncle?) thereof.

I've done quite a bit of (amateur/casual) reading into the histories of English and Norse languages, but the Norman part I haven't exactly dug into yet (beyond exactly how it influenced modern English and induced a lot of the differences from Old and Middle English) so now my curiosity's a bit piqued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some interesting thoughts but this aversion to the word "guys" needs to stop. My wife uses it all the time to address both mixed and exclusively female groups, it's completely gender neutral. If words like "guys" are causing someone distress then there are obviously bigger issues we need to address.

It's also bizarre that this guide suggests avoiding colloquialisms and then suggests using "y'all". I've never heard anyone in the UK say that outside of attempting to imitate a Texan.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure. To me, "How many guys have you slept with?" is a gendered question.

> If words like "guys" are causing someone distress then there are obviously > bigger issues we need to address.

Maybe this is true, but we can address the bigger issues while also making sure people are comfortable in the meantime :) it's really not a big deal to just avoid using a certain word if people don't like it.

<comment><USER9> > it's really not a big deal to just avoid using a certain word if people > don't like it.

Okay, I say saying word veggies distresses me. Please stop using that word everyone. eat_veggies distresses me the most, coz it implies that the word veggies is used as healthy food, while I dont like eating healthy. I think its offensive from you to tell me what to eat.

See? The problem with that kind of thinking is that anyone can declare anything distressing. If we declare "guys" as distressing, and allow gradual wiping of the word on that basis, where do we draw the line?

I think all the guys should take a breath, eat some veggies and start worrying about other things, than if someone adressed them by word they dont like. I seriously dont get this trend of validation of being ofended by most random things.

<comment><USER10> > See? The problem with that kind of thinking is that anyone can declare > anything distressing.

True, but it tends to be quite easy to separate the real from the disingenuous like yours. So that's there I draw the line at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some other style guides: [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing- for-gov-u...](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk) [https://service-manual.nhs.uk/content/how-we-write](https://service- manual.nhs.uk/content/how-we-write)

</comment><comment><USER12> The author recommends using emoji in writing. Not sure about that. Person to person writing, such as texting, sure. One to many writing, maybe not. Twitter supports emoji, but tweets seldom use them.

<comment><USER13> > The author recommends using emoji in writing.

Not quite. They're saying "This is a ... overview of how we write" In other words, when Monzo people want to sound like Monzo, they recommend using emoji :)

It's not a universal recommendation, it's a brand identity. You do you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This guide makes me happy because I need to understand companies quickly and clearly, thanks for that.

</comment><comment><USER15> I follow similar practices on my website. I help people settle in Germany. Since I can't assume people are native English speakers, I use simple english. It's surprisingly hard. When I revisit old guides, I can notice how much I have learned.

Struggling with German helped me become better at writing for those who struggle with English.

I use Hemingway to spot long sentences, difficult words and other problems.

I also use text formatting and typography to great effect. It makes the text easier to skim if you just need a specific piece of information.

Here are some of the things I learned:

* Put the short answer at the start, and highlight it. I try to make my content the opposite of clickbait.

* Use short, unambiguous sentences. Let readers catch their breath. Don't write sentences like Tarantino writes stories.

* Avoid idioms and expressions as much as possible.

* Use can/should/must exclusively.

</comment><comment><USER16> "The psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has an idea called 'the curse of knowledge'."

He didn't have the idea originally, it is a generally accepted idea that predates him and should better not be associated with Pinker's feelgoodery bias.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a great resource, very well written.

</comment><comment><USER18> Living in country where English is not the first language has made me aware of this kind of stuff all the time when I am writing. Particularly also, I have the "what will google translate this to" check in the back of my mind.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now if they can only expunge "leverage" as a verb, except in the sense of investing with borrowed capital.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love Monzo's tone of voice guide. We basically use it as our own, with a couple of small tweaks.

</comment><comment><USER21> Man I found it hard to maintain that latinate tone when I was writing scientific papers.

</comment><comment><USER22> What is tone of voice? Any basic primers for the autistic?</comment>